That “must do something” feeling has probably increased as we approach an election year. The Conservative Government have gone a bit more cautiously and trodden a little more gently and carefully into this area than the previous Labour Government.
The Labour Government went all guns blazing straight into the Labour anti-civil libertarian state they so carefully constructed and made sure they managed so effectively. The Conservatives have played this game a little differently, but we are now into an election year. So what is a good move to get people overexcited about political issues? What is the approach to take? It is, “Get a terror Bill, to make sure you are seen to be hard on this. That will differentiate us, and challenge the Labour party and all our political opponents to say we are doing this wrong.” That is not a game we have a particular interest in playing.
So we have this idea and this conversation we are having between the Government and Scottish Ministers, but the Scottish Government did not even get sight of some of the measures in this Bill on First Reading. I know that the Minister has been in touch with our new Justice Secretary, so he will know the unhappiness there is in Scotland about some aspects of all this. The Scottish Government have said that because we have responsibility for the public bodies mentioned in so many bits of this Bill, we want proper consultation. We are not interested in this fast-tracking and getting it through as quickly as possible because it is an election year—we want to do this right. Where we have devolved responsibilities for delivering this agenda, we want to make sure that the public bodies accountable to our Parliament will be properly consulted, so that we can shape up and make sure we have proper agenda. We have therefore asked the Minister to take Scotland out of the Prevent side of these measures. The schedules relating to Scottish public bodies have already been dropped in part of this. I suggest, and I hope the Minister may be open to this approach, that he seeks to ensure that we at least have the opportunity to engage with our public bodies and consult them properly, and to make the right decisions that suit our agenda and our responsibilities. That would be good. Sometimes we tend to look at things such as the Prevent strategy in a proper, holistic way, considering how public bodies could also promote cohesion, well-being and democracy. That is the way we differ on looking at these things, and we hope the Government follow our approach.
Let me say something about my commitment and my reason for taking this on. David Haines, the British man so brutally executed by ISIS forces in Iraq, was a constituent of mine. His family were in Perth, and I was at the memorial service that was held. His killing was an appalling act and it brought this right home to my community. The way the people of Perth responded to what they had observed—the brutal, appalling murder—was nothing short of magnificent. They made sure that David Haines was properly commemorated and that his memory will endure in Perth, and it was fantastic. So I know how these issues are brought home to specific communities and I have seen the wonderful way communities unite to make sure they gather around that family, making sure they are supported, and try to understand. But the most impressive thing for me was that I saw a real attempt to understand what was going on within this—more so than probably the Government have done. People wanted to understand why this happened in our community and what special conditions led to this happening in a small, sleepy little city such as Perth.
Every single one of us in this House has a job of work to do to keep our communities safe and to keep brave people such as David Haines safe. David Haines
went out there to help the world become a better place and to ensure that communities without help and assistance could be helped and assisted. All of us have a responsibility in this regard, so I will take no lectures from anybody in this House about being soft on terrorism or about our Government taking no interest in this matter. We all have an interest in this matter. We might not all agree on everything. I vehemently disagreed with the approach of the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles when she was in the Labour Government. I was keen on what the Conservative-led Government were doing at first, but I am less keen now. But let us all work together. We need to look at this whole thing holistically. We should take responsibility for the things that we do wrong and challenge the horrible extremism and ideology that exist in our communities, but let us do it together, do it sensibly and do it constructively.
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